SanDisk Cruzer Ultra Fit 3.0

[flibberdipper]

INTRO

About 2 months ago, I got a 25 dollar Best Buy gift card that I had no idea what to spend on. Then I remembered all my flash drives are garbage, and started shopping for those. And I came across this model. I bought a 64GB model (used for the testing) for $16 USD, and a 32GB model for $12. Seems like it’s too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well… I guess we’ll find out.

 

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

My first impression was “Holy hell this is tiny, those connector covers will never go back on, they will get lost, and I will lose these drives (well one of them). Now, on the whole “tiny” factor, I actually needed a 32GB drive this side to stuff in the front of my Xbox 360 and forget about it. Which it’s small enough to do, although you can’t open the little door in the front anymore (not that I actually need the other port).

 

LOOKS

Overall, this is a pretty sharp looking device. It barely juts out from the port, and the bigger end really helps getting it out of tight spaces. It also comes with a loop to put on a keychain, if you like. The plastic end has a pretty neat looking textured finish, and the red status LED is subtle (off when not in use, and a slow blink when in use, which does irritate me personally as I’d rather have it be solid on when written to and then as soon as it’s done stop). Also the font they used on the metal bit is kinda cool.

 

QUALITY

These drives feel like you could throw them off a bridge and they’d survive. But, not all is rosy and good. These things get HOT. During a transfer of just 2GB of data, the drive speed plummets. After it was done I unplugged it and got some temperatures. It peaked at nearly 103F at the end (part with plastic and all the goodies). Not good. BUT, this only happened when doing writes, and only seemed to happen on USB 3.0. Moving data from the drive was nothing but sunshine, lollipops and rainbows.

 

SPEED

So important stuff: All tests were performed with data being in a RAM disk capable of throughputs reaching into the gigaBYTES per second, so the only “bottleneck” in these tests will be the flash drive, in this case the 64GB model. All tests were (of course) run on a USB 3.0 port. And as you can see... Performance is very solid. Not quite as good as my WD My Passport Ultra, which pins writes and reads in at about 115MB/s both ways, but still very respectable for a cheap USB 3.0 flash drive (which is tiny, on top of that).

 

TEST 1: 2GB MOVIE (WRITE FROM RAMDISK, WRITE THROTTLE, MOVE TO RAMDISK)

 

TEST 2: 2GB OF MUSIC (WRITE FROM RAMDISK, WRITE THROTTLE, MOVE TO RAMDISK)

 

SOFTWARE

There is none. No more of those cheesy Cruzer utilities from like 6 years ago. Yay.

 

CONCLUSION

Overall, with a fix to the temperature issue and the random throttling, these seem like solid drives. Lots of reviews on NewEgg seem to say that they failed after 2 months of light use, but after my 2 months of light use they seem to be holding up fine, so either I’m lucky or everyone else just isn’t. One thing I wouldn’t mind seeing is a better LED for activity. The current one just doesn’t really show the activity all that well, and I personally like to see exactly what my drives are doing.

 

IS IT WORTH IT?

As per usual, this part always depends on price. No matter how you look at it, $20 USD or less for a 64GB USB 3.0 flash drive is a bloody fantastic deal, even if it does tend to throttle after doing a load of writes.

 

As for the 32GB model, while not as good as a deal compared to the 64GB model, it’s still a solid drive for the money.

[79wjd]

Mini flash drives have really come down a lot in the last couple of years. I bought a 64gb Corsair Vega for like $40 (now 128gb is $35, and $64gb is like $20).

 

I figured I should throw in my two cents about my Corsair Vega to show how they compare. The testing was done with a PCIE SSD in my Mac, so it should have been far from being a bottleneck. Personally I prefer the Vega due to aesthetic reasons. 

Read speeds -- 10 seconds to copy a 1.4gb file -- 140MB/s.

Write speeds -- 65 seconds to copy a 1.4gb file -- 21.5MB/s.

[flibberdipper]

3 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

Mini flash drives have really come down a lot in the last couple of years. I bought a 64gb Corsair Vega for like $40 (now 128gb is $35, and $64gb is like $20).

 

I figured I should throw in my two cents about my Corsair Vega to show how they compare. The testing was done with a PCIE SSD in my Mac, so it should have been far from being a bottleneck. Personally I prefer the Vega due to aesthetic reasons. 

Read speeds -- 10 seconds to copy a 1.4gb file -- 140MB/s.

Write speeds -- 65 seconds to copy a 1.4gb file -- 21.5MB/s.

Ouch. That write speed is... Ouch.

[79wjd]

3 minutes ago, tmcclelland455 said:

Ouch. That write speed is... Ouch.

Meh, for me it doesn't make a big difference, so I'd take the better aesthetics/completely metal build any day. But what was the average write speeds for yours?

[flibberdipper]

6 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

Meh, for me it doesn't make a big difference, so I'd take the better aesthetics/completely metal build any day. But what was the average write speeds for yours?

Psh, I use it in USB 2.0 so I don't deal with the weird throttly thing. In USB 2, it always manages 40-50MB/s.

[79wjd]

7 minutes ago, tmcclelland455 said:

Psh, I use it in USB 2.0 so I don't deal with the weird throttly thing. In USB 2, it always manages 40-50MB/s.

Yeah, the Vega's controller leaves a lot to be desired -- I get like 50MB/reads, 10MB/s writes over USB 2.0. But still worth it to me. (the USB 2.0 testing was done on my desktop to a 250gb 840 evo whereas the 3.0 testing was done on my Mac with a PCIE SSD).